How Our Assessment Works — and What It Can't Do

Health tools earn trust by being clear about their limits. This page explains exactly how the NutricaMeds assessment reaches its suggestions, where our information comes from, and where the honest boundaries of an online screening tool lie.

The assessment, step by step

1. Adaptive questioning. The test asks about 20 questions covering your symptoms, diet, lifestyle, life stage and medications. It's adaptive: your answers steer which follow-up questions appear, the way a clinician narrows things down rather than reading a fixed checklist.
2. Analysis grounded in medical literature. Your answers are analyzed by an AI engine that uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — meaning it doesn't answer from memory alone, but retrieves relevant passages from a curated library of medical reference documents and bases its analysis on them. The library is built from the published guidance of the organizations listed below.
3. Risk ranking, not diagnosis. The result you see is a ranked list of nutrient deficiencies that plausibly fit your pattern, with the reasoning behind each — designed to tell you which blood test is worth asking your doctor about, not to replace that test.
4. No account, no charge. The assessment is free and doesn't require an email address. The site is supported by advertising, which is what keeps the tool free to use.

Where our information comes from

Every factual claim on our pages — symptoms, recommended intakes, risk groups, upper limits — is checked against the published guidance of these organizations, and each content page links to its primary sources:

• NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS)

  Health-professional fact sheets — our primary reference for intakes, deficiency symptoms and upper limits.
• World Health Organization (WHO)

  Global nutrition guidelines and deficiency prevalence data.
• Merck Manual (Professional Edition)

  Clinical presentation and progression of deficiency states.
• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health & Linus Pauling Institute

  The Nutrition Source and the Micronutrient Information Center.

Our editorial policy

We keep this simple and honest:

• Sourced, not opinionated. Health claims on this site trace back to the references above, and content pages link their sources so you can verify anything yourself.
• Modern tools, checked output. We use AI tools in drafting and maintaining our content, and every page is checked against its cited primary sources before publication. Where evidence is mixed — magnesium and sleep, for example — we say so rather than overstate it.
• Dated and maintained. Each content page shows when it was last reviewed. When guidance changes, pages get updated, not abandoned.
• No supplement sales. We don't sell or take commissions on supplements, so we have no incentive to tell you that you need one. Several of our pages spend more words on what not to take.
• Corrections welcome. Spot an error? Tell us — we'd genuinely rather fix it than defend it.

What this tool is not

An online assessment cannot measure anything in your blood, and no honest tool will pretend otherwise. It can't diagnose a deficiency, rule one out, or replace a doctor who knows your history. What it can do — and what it's built for — is the step before the doctor's visit: turning a vague "I've been feeling off" into a specific, evidence-based question: "Could you check my ferritin and vitamin D?" If your results ever conflict with what your body is telling you, trust your body and see a professional.

Try it, or read the research first